Scientific Note

1. Brian Switek: Evolutionary Anthropology Study Suggests Running Barefoot
   

   Humans that had to escape from saber-toothed cats, giant hyenas, and charging mammoths did not wear Nike or Adidas sneakers. They ran barefoot, but don’t feel too bad that they did not have good running shoes to help them. As suggested by a team of researchers led by Daniel Lieberman in the latest issue of Nature, habitually shoeless runners have a unique step that may be better for our feet than even the most expensive, cushioned running shoe.

2. Sharon Astyk: Garden Calendar
   

   unless you have a very small garden, you need a calendar entirely devoted to the garden. Then, you sit down and write. I start by counting back 12 weeks from my last frost date (you can find this out from your local extension). That’s when I start my earliest plants indoors (actually, I usually start a few greens before that, but they are few enough to not worry about).

3. Pamela Ronald: Obama, Beachy and Sustainable Agriculture
   

   What does Beachy’s appoinment mean for researchers, farmers and consumers?
   
   
   
   Larger, longer grants with more money for education or extension, so the knowledge can reach from the lab to the food to the fork; a stonger focus on sustinable approaches; and a regulatory stucture that is science based.

4. Carina Storrs: Toxic Torts and Public Health
   

   Hollywood endings are the exception in environmental health lawsuits, as David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz know firsthand. In 2005, Rosner, a professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and Markowitz, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, were expert witnesses in a Rhode Island civil trial charging three makers of lead-based paint with selling the product even though they knew lead was dangerous to children. The pair helped seal “one of the most important public health victories of the past century,” wrote The Nation, which would have forced the paint makers to pay billions in damages. But the state Supreme Court overturned the decision in 2008.

5. Ed Yong: Terminally Ill Ants Choose To Die Alone
   

   Like Captain Oates, workers of the ant species Temnothorax unifasciatus will also walk off to die in solitude, if they’re carrying a fungal infection. In fact, Jurgen Heinze and Bartosz Walter found that workers, regardless of the reason for their demise, take their last breaths in a self-imposed quarantine. A Temnothorax worker may spend its life in the company of millions, but it dies alone.

PLoS: Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
In recent years, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Support for this proposal seemingly came from experimental studies on captive chimpanzees that showed that individuals were limited in the ways they shared or cooperated with others.

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NPR: Humans Were Born to Run Barefoot

there are some scientists who say we’re naturally born runners as well, that our bodies evolved to run. Now, anthropologist Dan Lieberman, one of the proponents of the “human runner” school, concludes that we do it better without shoes.

Mike the Mad Biologist: Is Thorium an Answer to Global Warming?

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